Been away a while

And everything looks different! I hope I can figure out how to post stuff in this new environment.

I just posted the very lastest chapter in one of the longest ongoing stories on Fanfiction.net, my story nine2five. It’s actually 20 episodes with 4 chapters each, so it doesn’t look as big as it really is. I’ve been gathering all the chapters into one document, though, and this monster is 190K words! On the other hand lots of the people writing fewer chapters have many more words in them, so from a word count perspective my story is nowhere near the largest.

I wouldn’t have thought I could do such a thing, and to be honest I think there are several factors that made it happen. Most important was my love for the show I was writing about, especially the characters. Second was the support from several readers on the boards, who would write in to comment on every chapter. This support is wonderfully encouraging, even though I would have written the story even if no one had said anything. (But I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much.) Last is the fact that the story already existed. I was rewriting an entire season of the show, which had a deep and subtle storyline that the writers buried under a mountain of poor writing, lack of continuity, and my own personal pet peeve, lack of story logic. While many call my story an AU, I think it is in fact very close to what the producers were really doing, even though it isn’t very close to what they were trying to do, and further still from what they did.

This project has been monopolizing my time for months, and the closer it got to completion the more I wanted to get it done, but at the same time, get it done right!

I think it helped that last weekend I was at Readercon once again. The man running the dealer room was trying to get more self-published authors in there, so he offered me a space (under my publisher’s name, but no matter) with the proviso that I would host these authors’ titles. So I was in Burlington MA last weekend, and with the press of business I didn’t really do much writing, so I ended up thinking a lot about what I wanted to do for this last chapter, and it came out pretty well.

Readercon itself was good, from a dealer perspective. A little cold in the ballroom, but we sold more books this time than we did last time we were there, so that’s a win. On the other hand I found only one panel I wanted to attend, on the subject of POV, which gave me some ideas for new panels which I suggested to the programming group. So if I’m lucky maybe I’ll be asked to participate in a panel or two next year. (Hey, I’m a fantasy writer, it’s practically my job to dream!) Last time there were four, on subjects of genre evaporation and interstitiality. Good stuff, but not everybody’s cup of tea, just as the dominant topics of this year’s con weren’t mine. I spent a lot of time in the con suite having fun talking about various bookish topics with just lots of people. I met the editor who rejected Ghostkiller, and I met another editor that I’ll be sending Ghostkiller to in the near future! But I want to reread it first. After so long on nine2five, I think I can bring fresh eyes to the project!